Bethany's Sin (1980) by Robert R. McCammon: Horror vet McCammon's second published novel is a loopy, often purple piece of pulp horror. It's almost endlessly fascinating. I'm also pretty sure it holds the record for most uses of the phrase "female musk" in a non-pornographic novel.
The novel pits a Viet Nam vet with childhood trauma issues (and Viet Nam torture issues... and psychic precognitive ability) against a supernatural cult of killer women who control the small Pennsylvania town of Bethany's Sin he and his wife and daughter have just moved to. The supernatural cult rides around on horses at night killing and dismembering men. And they intend to induct his wife and daughter into their ranks.
There are many flaws in this novel, a fact of which McCammon himself was later much aware -- for awhile, he all but disowned his first four novels. The wife especially is a narrative problem, a plot object rather than a convincingly realized character. The psychic abilities of the protagonist ultimately seem gratuitous -- the plot could unfold without them, and there's more than a hint of the wild talent vs. supernatural menace concept used much more expertly and organically in Stephen King's earlier The Shining.
McCammon also severely undercharacterizes any possible allies the protagonist might find in Bethany's Sin: there are a lot of characters here, but the novel seems severely underpopulated. And the explanation for the name of the town, when it comes, would only really make sense if the town's origin came at least 100 years earlier. As is, the revelation provokes a bemused, "Really?", primarily because the explanation has been pounded into the wrong-shaped hole by a plot decision that isn't necessary or all that convincing.
But there's also a certain amount of fun here, and signs of a writer finding his voice at points. There's a highly unpleasant rape scene, but it non-stereotypically involves the rape of a male character by a trio women. Scenes set at the blighted wasteland of the dump depict a well-conceived Hell-in-miniature. And the protagonist is an almost emblematically tormented McCammon male protagonist.
The climax owes too much to a few too many action movies and certain pulp cliches, especially those in which a character suddenly turns into a cross between Batman and Sgt. Rock after hundreds of pages of more realistic depiction. That could have been solved with a few more allies for our hero (Stephen King understood this in 'Salem's Lot), but McCammon wouldn't figure out how to create a group hero for purposes of verisimilitude for a few more books.
The wife remains an annoying cipher to the very end, trussed up like Penelope Pitstop when she isn't repeatedly denying the town's essential weirdness. There's a certain amount of enjoyment here, clouded somewhat by some luridly purple descriptive passages and a whole lot of female musk. Lightly recommended.
Mystery Walk by Robert R. McCammon (1983): By the mid-1980's, Robert McCammon was a best-selling horror writer whose publishers very firmly positioned him in the tradition of Stephen King. He eventually got tired of being pigeon-holed and all but vanished for about a decade before returning in the early oughts. It's actually a brave moment for a writer -- McCammon could have kept writing contemporary horror for years, as he'd become a very popular writer when he changed.
Mystery Walk is late-early McCammon, a big jump forward from his first few enjoyable but very pulpy novels of the late 1970's and early 1980's. Is it Kingian? Not consciously, I don't think, and McCammon was always interested in the nuts and bolts of things, whether those things were science-fictional or supernatural in nature. A fair bit of Mystery Walk explores how the supernatural powers of its linked protagonists work, and why, in a metaphysical sense.
The novel follows dirt-poor half-Choctaw Bill Creekmore and seemingly magical faith healer Wayne Falconer into their early twenties in the 1960's and early 1970's. Both hail from a racist, somewhat toxic small town in Alabama. Both must come to terms with supernatural powers: while Falconer can sometimes call upon healing powers, Creekmore can interact with the ghosts left behind by violent deaths and convince them to move on to the afterlife. Both are pursued by a malign supernatural other known to them as the Shape Changer.
McCammon's characters are finely and sympathetically drawn here for the first time in his career. There's a real sense of dread to the supernatural set-pieces that dot the novel. My favourite is a battle between Billy and a supernaturally infected carnival ride. McCammon manages to create sympathy for Falconer as well, as he goes down the wrong path for understandable reasons and ends up under the sway of a somewhat cartoonish Los Angeles mobster with a fear of contamination that makes Howie Mandel look like Pigpen.
Despite its scenes of horror, Mystery Walk occupies the borderlands between horror and dark fantasy. Even early in his career, McCammon resisted being just one thing, and the novel shows an affinity for Ray Bradbury as much as it does a resemblance to Stephen King. The Bradbury influence shows up in content, not in style, and it would again and again throughout McCammon's career. Billy's time spent working for a magician at a traveling carnival is the most Bradburyian stretch here, and it's the most enjoyable of the novel.
McCammon also does a fairly sensitive job of using Native American mythology (or at least the semblance of Native American mythology) to supply the underpinnings of the supernatural forces at work in the novel. The Shape Changer's motivations only come into complete focus in the novel's climax, and they make perfect sense. The journeys to self-awareness of Falconer and especially Billy are the eponymous 'Mystery Walk.'
Certain things are problematic. The aforementioned mobster doesn't fit organically into the novel, and his almost cartoonish qualities make him seem like a James Bond villain from the Roger Moore era by the time we're done with him. The set-up for the climax stretches credibility to its limits, even in a novel in which we must accept the presence of the supernatural. But you're watching a young but capable writer figure out how to put things together. It all ends up feeling like the somewhat uneven but ultimately rewarding start to a series of novels that never materialized. Recommended.
Usher's Passing by Robert R. McCammon (1984): There's more than a whiff of the Southern Gothic about the writing of McCammon (an Alabama native). It doesn't come out in his prose, which has remained sturdy and serviceable throughout his career, but in the plots and characters, which can sometimes jostle with one another in odd, baroque ways. There's about three novels' worth of plot and characters in Usher's Passing. It's about half-a-novel too much, but I was never bored.
After a prologue that establishes Edgar Allan Poe as having based "The Fall of the House of Usher" on a real American family of arms dealers, the novel leaps to the (then) present day of 1984. The patriarch of the Usher family is dying of a peculiar, terrible ailment that only Ushers get. Two of the three heirs are jostling for position, while the third, horror novelist Rix, really just wants to be left alone as he mourns the recent suicide of his wife.
But Rix will come home to Usherland, the Usher family complex that somehow keeps the Ushers unnaturally young-looking so long as they live on its grounds.
Once home, Rix begins to work on a secret history of the Ushers in the hopes that such a book about the immensely secretive clan will jumpstart his faltering writing career. Meanwhile, in the poverty-wracked homes that surround Usherland, a boy searches for his stolen brother. A mythical being called the Pumpkin Man has supposedly been stealing children from the countryside surrounding Usherland for generations. A mythical, giant snake-panther hybrid called Greediguts has been terrorizing the woods for just about as long. A mysterious old man with what appear to be magical powers lives in the ruins of a devastated, forgotten town whose crumbled walls are branded with Hiroshima shadows, at the top of the area's highest hill.
Something lurks inside the original, now-abandoned, gigantic, Winchester-House-like Usher mansion -- abandoned decades ago but still dominating the landscape. Sometimes people who go into the mansion never come out. There are stories of strange earthquakes, comets falling on the mountains, people possessed of magical powers. The fate of the Usher patriarch is always terrible. And the current Usher patriarch is secretively creating a new, devastating weapons system for the U.S. government.
And that's the set-up. Mostly. There are a couple of other subplots that ultimately feed back into the main narrative. McCammon gives us a wealth of creepy historical incident and a number of sharply drawn, sympathetic characters, most prominently Rix and the boy searching for his brother. It all fits together nicely, this story of Gothic horror and nuclear terror and family secrets. Recommended.
